UC Riverside Medical School Gets New Life

UC Riverside officials have secured some $10 million per year for a decade to finance a medical school and hope to enroll its first 50 students in the fall of 2013, it was reported today.

The long-cherished dream of a UC Riverside medical school was battered
last year when the state refused to pay for it and national accreditors
wouldn't allow it to open.

But UC Riverside is making what national experts told the Los Angeles
Times is a rare second attempt to gain approval for a medical school, and
officials have obtained alternative financing from private donors, local
government and the UC system.

"We have so much riding on the school being successful, we just can't
accept that it can't be done," G. Richard Olds, a tropical-disease expert who
is the founding dean of the UC Riverside medical school, told The Times. The
goal, he said, is to ease the shortage of doctors in the Inland Empire.

The medical school would be UC's sixth and its first to open since the
late 1960s. The school would be the only one in the system without its own
hospital, vastly cutting down on costs, according to The Times. UC's medical
centers and its health education programs constitute about half of the system's
$22 billion annual budget.

For three decades, UC Riverside has operated a joint medical school
program with UCLA. Its entering classes of about 25 students spend their first
two years in Riverside and finish in Westwood.

A four-year program at UC Riverside would offer clinical training at
community medical centers. The emphasis would be on basic fields, including
family medicine, pediatrics, gynecology, general surgery and psychiatry, not on
more exotic and expensive specialties, The Times reported.

UC Riverside also has a satellite campus in Palm Desert.